Mission Bay to welcome Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia program

1of9Mounds of dirt fill a vacant lot at 1300 Fourth Street in front of construction projects at Mission Bay in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2014. The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation just received the green light to build 135 affordable housing units on the property.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

2of9Mounds of dirt fill a vacant lot at 1300 Fourth St. in the Mission Bay neighborhood in San Francisco . The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation received the green light to build 135 affordable housing units on the property.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

3of9Pedestrians walk past an empty lot at 1300 Fourth Street at Mission Bay in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2014. The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation just received the green light to build 135 affordable housing units on the property.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

4of9Don Falk visits a vacant lot at 1300 Fourth Street at Mission Bay in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2014. Falk is executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, which just received the green light to build 135 affordable housing units on the property.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

5of9Don Falk visits a vacant lot at 1300 Fourth St. at Mission Bay in San Francisco on Nov. 13, 2014. Falk is executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, which just received the green light to build 135 affordable housing units on the property.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

6of9Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia St. is seen on Sept. 26, 2013.Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

7of9Shane Newell (left), 12, of Atascadero, raises his arm with Nick Gaensler (right), 11, of San Francisco, after he answered a trivia question to win a marble at 826 Valencia, a pirate supply store and a nonprofit dedicated to helping children and young adults develop writing skills.Photo: TIM HUSSIN / Special to The Chronicle

8of9Don Falk visits a vacant lot at 1300 Fourth Street at Mission Bay in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2014. Falk is executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, which just received the green light to build 135 affordable housing units on the property.Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

9of9Trees are planted along a vacant lot at 1300 Fourth Street at Mission Bay in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2014. The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation just received the green light to build 135 affordable housing units on the property.Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Novelist Dave Eggers’ trailblazing youth writing program, 826 Valencia, is setting up a new shop in Mission Bay, part of a low-income family housing development that could add vitality and variety to a neighborhood that can feel like a sterile playground for well-off doctors and engineers.

The city has selected Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. to build the 135-unit building at 1300 Fourth St. For TNDC, it’s a first foray into the suburban-feeling Mission Bay and a world away from the poverty and urban ills of the Tenderloin.

“People with low incomes should have choices of where to live, so they can make the best decisions for their families,” said TNDC Executive Director Don Falk. “The Mission Bay project gives working families who are being priced out of San Francisco one more option to stay.”

Mission Bay South — bordered by Mission Creek to the north, Mariposa Street to the south, the bay to the east and the Caltrain tracks to the west — is supposed to be a mixed-income neighborhood, with 32 percent affordable housing. But at the moment, it’s hard to see that. Out of 1,663 units completed so far — 804 rental units, 428 condos and 431 UCSF student housing units —150 are for low-income renters. An additional 900 units are under construction, all but 80 of which are market rate.

Far from being affordable to average San Franciscans, the neighborhood is attracting some of the city’s highest rents — two-bedroom condos in the neighborhood are selling for well over $1 million and apartments are renting for more than $4,500 a month.

In total, Mission Bay South will have 3,440 residential units, 1,108 of which will be defined as “affordable” — a category that, depending on the individual project, can range from housing for low-income veterans to homeless families to a middle-income family of four making as much as $116,000 a year.

While San Francisco is producing more affordable housing than any other city in the state, it’s still dwarfed by the amount of capital that market-rate builders are pouring into the state, particularly publicly traded real estate investment trusts, which see San Francisco as having the strongest market in the United States. That’s especially true in Mission Bay, where market-rate housing is getting built at a far faster pace.

'Strength’ in diversity

“These things take time to evolve,” said Bill Witte, president of Related California, which is building a 200-unit affordable project in the neighborhood. “This is not a neighborhood of 1880 Victorians. It’s not Alamo Square. The strength of Mission Bay is the mix of incomes. How many neighborhoods in San Francisco have that?”

But while the projects built so far are mostly market rate, Mission Bay South’s affordable housing engine is starting to rev up. In September, Mercy Housing opened 1180 Fourth St., a 150-unit building with 50 apartments set aside for formerly homeless families.

Families are rapidly filling it up — 103 so far, with more moving in every week. The demand for units at 1180 Fourth St. was extraordinary: 2,995 applications for 150 units. There are already 193 children in the building, and Mercy Housing expects to have upward of 300 kids.

The computer lab and teen lounge are opening next week. “I live in the neighborhood and have noticed a lot more kids around,” said IIeah La Vora, project manager for Mercy Housing. “You see kids playing on Mission Creek Park.”

In March, Chinatown Community Development Center, along with Related California, is slated to start work on 200 units at 588 Mission Bay Blvd., Witte said. People making less than 60 percent of the Bay Area median income will be eligible for the units — $58,000 for a family of four.

Gateway building

The building at 1300 Fourth St., which has 10,000 square feet of retail, will be a gateway to the Fourth Street retail corridor. It will have a two-story corner space with an outdoor dining area overlooking a park. The building’s interior will feature a network of mid-block courtyards with a two-level children’s play area. The project will create a place for “those who would otherwise be left with little or no choice for safe, affordable housing,” said Tiffany Bohee, executive director of the city’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure.

“It needs to be big in scale and strong and monumental on the park and continuity of retail,” said project architect Daniel Solomon of Mithun/Solomon. “The other things around it are big and imposing. It needs to hold its own.” The project will cost $77 million, funded by OCII, affordable housing bonds, tax credits and state and federal money

Eggers’ 826 Valenica group, which runs after-school writing programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and other cities, will draw kids settling into the new neighborhood with its signature mix of nuts-and-bolts literacy skills and mind-bending poetry and fiction, said Jeff White, housing program manager for the OCII. He said it would draw in kids from 1180 Fourth St. and other family housing that is eventually built.

While affordable housing is lagging far behind the market-rate housing in Mission Bay South, the program is on track. “It’s just that the market rate popped up a lot quicker than we thought it would,” he said.

J.K. Dineen joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 2014, focusing on real estate development for the metro group, a beat that includes land use, housing, neighborhoods, the port, retail, and city parks. Prior to joining The Chronicle, he worked for the San Francisco Business Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Daily News, and a bunch of newspapers in his native Massachusetts, including the Salem Evening News and the MetroWest Daily News.

He is the author of two books: Here Tomorrow, about historic preservation in California (Heyday, 2013); and the forthcoming High Spirits (Heyday 2015), a book of essays about legacy bars of San Francisco.

A graduate of Macalester College, Dineen was a member of Teach For America’s inaugural class and taught sixth grade in Brooklyn, N.Y.